Associate Professor
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Dr. Rutishauser is an Associate Professor in Neuroscience in the Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology and Biomedical Sciences at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a visiting associate at the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Rutishauser received his PhD in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech and performed postdoctoral studies at Caltech and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Select awards include the Ferguson Award (2008), the Troland Award by the National Academy of Sciences (2014), a Next Generation Leader Award by the Allen Institute for Brain Science (2014), and the NIMH BRAINS award (2016). The Rutishauser laboratory is investigating the neural mechanisms of learning, memory and decision-making at the level of single neurons in humans. A key goal of the lab is to advance the technique of human single-neuron recordings by developing tools, methods and surgical techniques that allow such experiments. Recent work has focused on the neural representation of novelty and familiarity in the human hippocampus and amygdala, the role of human dopamine neurons in detecting novelty, the role of the theta rhythm in learning, and the neural representation of faces.